Friday, September 05, 2008

Zazen tomorrow at Hill Street Center. Details are in the links to your left. Don't forget to bring a crisp new $5 bill with you. The rent I'm paying to host these things ain't gettin' paid in good vibes!

When I was at the Great Sky Sesshin last month, my friend Greg Fain, from the San Francisco Zen Center, and I got assigned a job during work period to plane off a 1/4 inch of the bottom of a door so it would shut easier. While the two of us were carrying the door down the hill to the workshop, Greg made a mocking show of it being really heavy, which it wasn't. Then he said, "Dogen said we should treat light things as if they're heavy!"

I'm not sure exactly where that quote comes from. But it means to treat everything like it has great value, no matter what it is. When you're carrying a bag of trash out to the dumpster you should treat it like it's full of precious antique china. Don't read the paper while you eat, it's insulting to your food. That attitude. This is Buddhist morality.

I'm working on my book now and I came across the following passage. I don't like quoting myself because that's insufferably pretentious. But since some of you have e-mailed and asked to see previews of the book, I'll offer it for what it's worth:

The Middle Way was not some kind of spiritual path designed to make us all holy with shiny pink haloes on our noggins. It was a way to live a life that wasn’t a piece of shit. It was a way to find happiness and stability in an unhappy and unstable world. That’s really all any of us are looking for, when it comes down to it. The stability of the Middle Way comes in our practice of zazen, which is the actual physical and mental practice of stability and happiness. A bit of zazen in the morning and a bit in the evening radiates throughout the rest of the day and night and makes everything better. That’s all there is to it.

Morality is an important part of finding real happiness because we are all interconnected. I can’t be happy if I make the people around me miserable under the mistaken impression that their misery is not intimately connected with mine. So if I don’t want to be miserable I need to behave morally toward everyone I encounter. In Buddhism behaving morally doesn't mean following some fixed code of conduct. It means being careful.

But another aspect of Buddhist morality is that you have to do your part. You’re not here just for yourself. You’re here for everyone and everything you encounter. Your role is to do and say the things that need to be done and said from your unique perspective. God is too far removed from the universe to see himself clearly without splitting himself into a bazillion eyes and ears that watch over all aspects of himself. Whatever perspective you have is the most valuable thing in the universe. You need to be fully yourself. At the same time, you need to completely forget any idea you have about yourself. Or, if you can’t forget it, at least ignore it, secure in the knowledge that whatever you think you are isn’t what you really are.

i did some investigation of my own and check it man, turns out z-dawg was writing sick propaganda since 2oo2, omg, and like if you go to archive.org it's liek hayzooz we can demonstrate that he's the antichrist.

lissn' up yo, here's my prediction, i predict not only as i predicted like about 1 month before i piled up all this "BLOG EVIDENCE" against his vile ass that not only can i make it to where he loses his job, but like check it, i can make it where neo in the upcoming "the earth stood still" will be like godzilla rubber suit compared to the vileness and like omg evilness against mother earth bless her tired soul, let's save the ocean:z!

anyway, here's my proof, it was very hard to get man, like i had to google and shit. bow down to my computer prowess, i mean i even know how to grep a computer log, i'm way smart and can type 2 words in a row at the interval of 10 minutes without misspelling the same way.

shit, here it is guys, here it is:

2003-06-05 - 8:03 p.m.

> human trait <

taken as a whole, i'veobserved that the humanrace cannot accept whenit cannot kill something.

if they cannot kill something,that must mean their free willis taken away. therefore, youbetter allow people to kill you

rather sooner and definitelyor else they will make it atop priority and will not restuntil this lil thinghie dies.

perhaps that is the only wayto unite this goddam shithole,i challenge y'all to killhomer simpson!!!! you can't?

fuckin losers! do not restuntil homey simpson is deadwith a conclusive autopsyreport that shows not only

how, but how long it tookand how feasible it was.peoples of the planetooidEarth, UNITE behind the

slaughtering of public enemynumero uno, Homer J. Simpson,because you're not just provingyou can kill Homer, no sirreee

bobby, you actually prove thatyou kill the Jay and the DOTas well. People of the Earth,when you accomplish this task

satisfactorily, then and onlythen will you be worthy of thevogon yellow piss and you shallrejoice in swallowing it raw

live & direct from the blue skies.haha, relax, i'm just preparingfor the jay leno show tonite, i'mthinking jay will use some of my

well, my friends, if you've labeledme as the mike now, i do have togive voice to the bad, the uglythe opressed, the rich, the onesyou labeled whores & bitches andwhen i keep saying labeled, itmeans you never asked them if theyconcurred, you never asked them ifthey had a good reason against thelabeling, no, you fucking slappedtheir faces, kicked their shinslabeled them and processed them,serially and in bulk and always"for their own benefit" and selfprogress and shit, i gots to givemy mike to them i gots to let themmake me their keyboard and tell you,tell you all that that's how it'sbeen and that's how it won't befor long, because now i'm the mikeand i have to yell what everyonefeels like fuckin yellin thru myass, so i do what a keyboard does,it doesn't bitch when you hit ithard, it says thank you if youkeep slamming ESC and CTRLALTDELit does what keyboards do, theydon't give a fuck what your nastyfingers do and how much slime theyleave behind on the keys, they justkeep thanking you for broadcastingall your words to whoever wants toread them, that's where the hatecomes from my friends, not from me,but from those who you've been ridingfor so long and they lived in fearand constant terror, so now theymade me their mike and there youhave it, it's what they think ofyour riding. so ride my mike andmy keyboard darlings, tell everyoneabout your love for all that's lifeand all that's pretty in z world.

i'm not hearing much and if i heari promise to tell all and btw, dotell me, that's the quickest, fori can't ride & i can't read minds.

i'm a crippled monkey, yes?<<<

i'm telling you guys, straight from the google mouth, this guy is antichrist. he's 666in' our zen "practice" he's tryin' to destabilize the power grid with an iPhone at the beach.

EVERYBODY PANIC!

ps: he's a miserable fuck too, like one time, at band camp, his filthy rich wife dumped his ass, just like your filthy poor wife of your Teacher dumped His Holy Ass.

pps: that's why he's so miserable, man, because like in a previous life, he was liek, even like MORE MISERABLE, because shit man, you know like KARMA right and theory and shit, it says the MORE miserable, the MORE you like like you know MISERABLE, company and shit? right? okay well you see then it makes total sense, right my bitches, right? bow down, bitches, i figured out this assholy fucker man, i defended the Rubber Godzilla man, i'm his Rex now, i'll get to eat from his bowl once, wow, all i can say is like WOW.

anyway, anwyay, bitches don't keep me man, i gots to run to the sitting man, it starts at 10 AM bitch.

like sooooo early, man! shit i'm still drunk since yesterday's trip, right, bitch, remember the trance and the one night stand?

anyway, anyway, brad said GREAT WORDS TODAY, he's like shit, if you sit 5 min in the morning at 10 AM and then 5 in the evening, shit YOU CAN DRINK AND FUCK ALL YOU WANT.

when you get treated for diabetes, everyone's blood sugar levels go down or whatever they do and then you don't die. you can tell a person they're diabetic until you're blue in the face, year after year, their sugar levels won't go up (actually this one isn't quite true, it just depends HOW GOOD YOU ARE IN CONVINCING THEM), because you can drive a person sugar levels up by telling them diabetes is an impending disease they will succumb to shortly, anyway...

when you get treated for mental illness, everyone is different, but they all need to be medicated more, until they all agree it would be better to be dead, rather than continue living like medicated pigs in cages (see radiohead's fitter happier lyrix).

when they die, finally and almost always tragically, the news is always that the mental illness did its thing.

you want to know why michael bardan went "berserk" on the blog yesterday?

because your Teacher, in his Ultimate Wisdom, told you, dear Reader on the East Coast, with no one around you, practicing zazen in earnest, that if you have any sign of kundalini, you should turn yourself over to a Psychiatrist.

DO YOU UNDERSTAND THE ABOMINATION OF THIS STATEMENT?

okay, let's calm down then and call it IRRESPONSIBLE ASSHOLE BEHAVIOR.

Dear Ven. Braddy-Chan Retarded Bastard!

You have an audience with the most vulnerable crowd that practices zen.

Are you fucking stupid?

Have you completely lost your cookies?

Any MAKYO told about to the wrong person, and, my friend, your local Psychiatrist is the perfect example of the ULTIMATE WRONG PERSON to talk to when and if you need to talk about your zazen practice, is going to result in the person you talk to telling you:

You're going crazy!

Stop what you're doing now!

Go get a better job, son.

Go be productive and vote.

It's the U S of A, we're free already.

This is crazy talk to think there's more free than Born to be Free that The Boss sang about back whenever Springsteen fukken still made good songs.

You unbelievably RETARDED MASTER of bullshit!

Go back and modify your fucking article, go back and WRITE ANOTHER ONE to retract that stupid, imbecile statement and article if you know anything about zen.

DO IT TODAY AFTER HOPEFULLY SOMEONE READS YOU THIS COMMENT YOU STUPID SHIT-HEAD.

981723980472 books you write won't repair the bad karma you will incur if ONE you stupid fuck ONE of your students, unknowingly, takes their ass into a psychiatrist, the wrong one, because yes, there still are good ones too, like lawyers, probably as many!

IMBECILE MOTHERFUCKER VEN. BRAD WARNER MY ASS.

take the fucking $1.50 i left at your altar, hand it over to smoggyrob and tell him to flock you with it until it breaks!

15 messages ago when all you could retort back was something about Louis de Funes who knows more about zen than your entire Nishijima school combined, I had closed that post by saying you do look as a Rinzai master who could beat the shit out of a student when all he does is daydream and, while at it, incur huge bad karma for himself.

I beg you, get on a fucking plane, come to Santa Monica, tie Rubber Pornozilla to a goddam tree and whip him 8 time:Z!

Then hand him the whip and let him do the same to you.

You're just as retarded, I bet, and how I know is this way:

You got transmitted before you fucking understood what that does, before you fucking could do anything with it to keep it in check either.

yes, well, one day, mr. honorable jinzang, you will realize NOTHING is as it seems, not in this world, not in innumerable next.

you are correct about brad being not our teacher, he is nobody's teacher.

does that mean i'm supposed to suck up to him and watch him ruin his fucking life while blindly not seeing what it is he teaches and how someone with vested power of authority by virtue of conditioned label/symbol has responsibility hugely more than a fuckup like me who narcissistically spews hate day in day out on the introweb:z?

wow, look at the retard, he's quickly found the blog and already realized who's maniac and who's teacher.

impressive.

THIS IS A FUCKING ZEN BLOG YOU FUCKING IMBECILES. THIS ISN'T YOUR CORNER BLOG OR YOUR SUICIDE GIRL PORNO PLAYGROUND.

GET THE FUCK OUT BEFORE YOU SLIP IN THE BATHROOM AND CRACK YOUR SKULL OPEN "BY MISTAKE" AFTER READING ONE OF THESE NARCISSISTIC POST:Z!

i'm having a friendly convo with ven. brad warner whom one day i'll have star in one of my deluded movies.

then again, if he refuses, we can make it all manga waking life style and we'll impersonate him as pornozilla (zTM).

hey, can he get a character on the simpsons meanwhile? or at least family guy?

say braddy griffin would be like the new parrot addition to the family and all his lines would be from ole godzilla movie:z!

I AM PASSING TIME ON DEATH ROW ASSHOLE and i don't give a shit about TIME, at least that's my theory and I'm stickin' to it until you can figure out to drug me out of my mind again, make me catatonic for 8 million kalpas of yours and then, who knows, mebbe i'll finally forget about this blog and live and let live or something, meh.

shut up assfuck, i can skateboard and like dream about having a wakeboard one day, fully paid off, and then my boomer daddy mebbe will make enough in his retirement to buy me a nautique to haul my ass back and forth between 2 wake:z and like eat dick, okay!

ur stoopid man and my Teacher has a dick so big that i can swallow it hole and i can still talk on his behalf and like SHOW YOU MAN!

i am showing you my MANHOOD right here, man, i'm a fucking shoboshitzazen MORAL OF FIBER.